Japan Prepares for a Change as Voting Begins

Sunday

Aug 30, 2009 at 5:09 AM

The opposition is poised to unseat the incumbent Liberal Democrats for only the second time since 1955.

MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — As the polls opened on Sunday for Japan’s most important election in decades, the question seemed to be not whether the opposition would defeat the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party, but by how big a margin.

Recent polls show that the main opposition Democratic Party is likely to win well over 300 of the 480 seats being contested, giving it the majority needed to choose the next prime minister. Such a victory, which would be driven by voter discontent with Japan’s long economic and political stagnation, would unseat the incumbent Liberal Democrats for only the second time since 1955.

Unusually long lines were already forming in front of polling stations early Sunday morning, reflecting the intense interest here in the election, in which Japanese voters are feeling the rare thrill of deciding their nation’s course.

At an elementary school in Yokohama, a city near Tokyo, many voters said they felt only lukewarm about either party. They said instead that they were backing the opposition to shake up what they saw as a moribund system.

“I don’t think much will change,” said one voter, a 37-year-old salaryman who gave only his family name, Ichihara. “But political parties will be more competitive if they feel the threat of being replaced by another political party.”

There has even been concern here that the Democrats’ margin of victory could be too big. Some in the media have said a landslide could let the Democrats simply replace the Liberal Democrats as a dominant party, instead of creating the competitive two-party democracy that many had hoped would emerge from this election.

The Democratic leader, Yukio Hatoyama, has tried to allay such concerns by saying that his party would avoid the heavy-handed tactics abhorred in Japan’s consensus-driven political culture.

“If the Democratic Party becomes too big, they will become a new dictatorship,” said Miwako Sato, a 41-year-old homemaker in Yokohama. She said that for that reason she had split her vote between the Democrats and a smaller party.

Still, the tone of conversations on Japan’s talk shows and on the streets is a mixture of excitement and anxiety about the imminent end of more than a half-century of Liberal Democratic rule. It remains unclear if a switch would bring a big change in Japan’s direction, as the two centrist parties are close on most policies.

Rather, the nation has been transfixed by the saga of the governing party’s kingpins fighting for their political lives amid the anti-incumbent sentiment. Tabloids have reveled in reporting on former prime ministers and party power brokers in losing battles against largely unknown opposition candidates, many of them charming, younger women widely referred to as “assassins” because of their devastating political effect on their opponents.

One former prime minister, the gaffe-prone Yoshiro Mori, 72, drew the ire of many when he told voters not to be fooled by the “sexiness” of his opponent, a 33-year-old former temporary worker named Mieko Tanaka.

The Liberal Democrats are fighting back by mobilizing their own younger lawmakers, many of them also women, to campaign for older male colleagues.

One is Yuko Obuchi, 35, the daughter of a former prime minister, who is the special minister in charge of improving Japan’s low birthrate and is herself more than eight months pregnant.

On Friday, she campaigned in a working-class Tokyo neighborhood on behalf of Akihiro Ota, the leader of the New Komei Party, a Buddhist party that backs the Liberal Democrats. Mr. Ota, 63, is in a tight race with a woman representing the Democratic Party, Ai Aoki, a cheerful 44-year-old former kindergarten teacher.

Ms. Obuchi stood in front of a crowd of Liberal Democratic supporters and, rubbing her extended belly, began by saying she could give birth at any moment. “I tell my baby not to come out until after Aug. 30, because Mom’s busy till then,” she joked.

Listeners seemed resigned that the party would lose. But they said they wanted to see Ms. Obuchi instead of the unpopular Liberal Democratic leader, Prime Minister Taro Aso, because she gave the party a fresh face.

“The party needs to get rid of its old image,” said Hideo Shiba, 68, who owns a small construction company. “She symbolizes the future of the Liberal Democratic Party.”